We Are! Still! Penn State!

Drew Magary witnesses plenty of drinking, chanting, and whitewashing in Happy Valley on opening day of the post-Paterno era

Do you like slogans? Holy shit, do I have the town for you. This past Saturday, State College, Pennsylvania was a town awash in slogans. There were slogans on the windows and on the cars, on shirts and on tents, inside the stadium, and all around outside of it. Slogans, slogans everywhere, from the gentle to the menacing. Everyone had their slogan on Saturday, and that slogan was their personal statement about all this...this stuff that’s gone on over the past year. Even the name of the school itself—PENN STATE—was a slogan on this day. If you wore it, you believed it. And if you didn’t have a slogan, well, then you were probably me, and you probably felt very much out of place.

GQ sent me to State College this past weekend to get at look at Penn State in person, to soak in the atmosphere in this, Penn State’s first home opener without Joe Paterno in over six decades. The game was against Ohio University, and PSU would eventually lose 24-14 thanks to some shoddy defense and a rather nasty habit of dropping the ball (snicker snicker). This was a game many people believe never should have taken place. I wanted to decide for myself if I agreed with them, if I could detect any remaining value in a tradition that led to the worst cover-up in NCAA history, the downfall of a supposedly great man, and the poisoning of an entire community. And I did figure it all out, I swear. But first, we gotta take a drive.

To get to State College from where I live, you have to travel up through central Pennsylvania on Interstate 99, a stretch of road that winds its way along the Allegheny Mountains, past towns with super-American names like East Freedom and Bald Eagle. The views along the road are so nice that you have to fight to keep your eyes on the highway. It’s like Peter Jackson is shooting a movie right next to you.

This is a relatively new stretch of road. The last section of it opened in 2007, in part to handle the flow of traffic in and out of State College. So not only can you say that Joe Paterno built Penn State, but you could also argue that he built the roads leading to it. On the way up, I tuned into a kickass Altoona rock station that played hair-metal classics ("Still Loving You" by Scorpions—all too appropriate this weekend) and offered up important local news, including one item about a neighborhood shrubbery that had been vandalized. Ni!

Driving to college is still crazy exciting, even if you’re not a student anymore. There’s still that funny feeling you get in your stomach and in your loins as you get closer and closer to campus. PRETTY BUILDINGS! HOT YOUNG COEDS! FANCY LEARNIN’! You can’t help but psych yourself up for good times. That feeling is probably what keeps many an alum coming back year after year.

I dropped my shit off at the motel and started the walk through town to get to Beaver Stadium. Along the way, I got passed by an RV that was packed with people, and I could see some of the people inside already clutching beers. This was 8:30 in the morning. Beer tastes better the earlier you drink it.

I passed giant frat houses that looked halfway decent on the outside, but it was obvious that the insides were havens of unspeakable filth. You could see the frat brothers pre-gaming out on their balconies. I walked by a collection of brick apartment buildings that a lot of students called home. A drunk chick shouted "WE ARE" from the balcony and a group of guys in front of me offered up a "PENN STATE" in response.

On every window in every shop there was an 8 1/2"1" printout that read PROUD TO SUPPORT PENN STATE FOOTBALL. Apparently, a PDF was sent out a few days prior, encouraging people to print it out and tape it to their storefronts. Everyone complied. A few days later, as a way of counterbalancing all that football pride, another PDF was sent out that read PROUD TO SUPPORT PENN STATE ACADEMICS. Only a few of those signs made it up.

I tried to find the stadium by following around any student who was carrying beer, which was a mistake because most of the students were going back to their dorms first to get shitfaced. It’s amazing how hard it is to find Beaver Stadium if you’re just relying on crowds and your gut instinct (and if you’re too cheap to own a smartphone). It seats more than 100,000 people. It could probably host a family reunion for aircraft carriers. And yet, Penn State itself is so enormous that the stadium can hide with relative ease. I found a route along University Drive by watching three dark blue school buses speed down the road led by a police escort. Every fan cheered and waved to the buses as they flew by. The Penn State players inside didn’t wave back. They had shit to focus on.

I got to the front parking lot of the Stadium around 9 a.m., and you could already hear fans inside chanting the "WE ARE" call-and-response from their seats. I came along the first lot of tailgaters, trying to find my host for the day, an alum who asked to remain anonymous for this article. He told me to look for a blue tent. They were ALL blue tents. I walked through the first tailgate lot, and then another, and then another. The tailgaters blanketed the land, spilling past the baseball stadium and around the hills and telephone poles, like rushing floodwaters. They were everywhere: hundreds of fancy RVs (how can so many people afford such nice RVs?), thousands of satellite dishes (how can so many people know how to transport and realign their satellite dishes?), and god knows how many flaming grills (how can so many people transport grills that are larger than their own cars?).

I walked past two men holding a vigorous discussion about the state of the program. "What surprised me is that the state legislature did nothing!" one said, with the other nodding fervently in agreement. There’s a rumor going around—still unverified—that the University will foot the NCAA’s $60 million fine simply by not going ahead with scheduled renovations to Beaver Stadium’s notoriously cramped press box. People here very much approve of that plan.

It felt as if all the tailgaters had been here since the last Penn State home game, against Nebraska in November 2011. They drank and ate and played cornhole (snicker snicker), and their children ran around without any visible fear of anyone coming and, you know, doing bad things to them. It looked like all the other tailgate festivals going on in all the major college towns that day, in Lincoln and Stillwater and elsewhere. There was nothing special about it unless you were a Penn State fan, in which case it was all very special because it was yours.

The only visible difference at this tailgate was the slogans. I saw so many slogans that I wished everyone at Penn State had sat down on Friday prior to gametime and settled on just one. But they didn’t, and this was the resulting word soup:

"Penn State Forever"
"Joe Knows Football"
"We Are"
"We Care"
"Those who stayed may not be champions, but they will forever be legends." (I thought this one was the stupidest of the bunch.)
"Roll up your pant legs. This is JoePa’s house."
"Still Proud"
"Success with honor"
"Coach Paterno, only one thing: Thank you!"
"NCAA" (with a hammer & sickle replacing the C)
"Restore the roar"
"Hey media... we know the truth" (Somehow I doubt that Bobby from Delta Upsilon knew more about the Sandusky case than Sara Ganim)
"O’Brien’s Lions"
"We Are... Pissed Off" (It’s worth noting that no one who rocked this slogan looked all that pissed off)
"More than a man, more than a coach, you touched our soul"
"One Team"
"Those people" (???)
"Billieve" (referring to PSU head coach Bill O’Brien)
"We are... because he was"

The one I saw the most often was a simple shirt that read "HAPPY VALLEY," a shirt they were selling in all the bookstores and at the Museum Shop at the stadium. I liked that slogan the most. If I was a drunken Penn Stater, that’s the one I would have chosen. Everyone walking by flashed peace signs to one another, just to reinforce how happy they were to be in this valley.

I found my tailgate party and drank as much Coors Light as I possibly could, while playing Once Around with my companions (you pass the ball around in a circle and if you drop it, you be drinkin’). Overhead, a Cessna flew fly by dragging a banner that read "OUST ERICKSON / TRUSTEES," in reference to new school president Rodney Erickson and the board of trustees, who allowed the NCAA to bring down the hammer on Penn State football. Few people on the ground seemed to notice or care.

An hour before gametime, I staggered back to the stadium looking for the site where Paterno’s statue once stood. On my quest, I passed by a barn on the edge of the stadium grounds that looked like someone built it there on purpose, to emphasize the bucolic surroundings. I asked eight different cops for directions to the statue site and they gave me eight different replies, one of which I’m certain was deliberately intended to throw me off. I felt creepy asking where it was again and again, because it was an admission to people that I wasn’t from here. And if I’m not from here, well then why am I snooping around for JoePa? I was essentially labeling myself a tourist of death. Before I could find the right spot, the game was about to begin. JoePa would have to wait.

Beaver Stadium was at nearly full capacity on Saturday, with a handful of empty seats at the top in the corners of the stadium. I sat alone in WB section (one half of stadium’s sections start with W, the other half start with E. W-E, get it?). There was a squat, older woman in the seat in front of me. Not in it, actually. On it. For the duration of pregame, the woman stood on her bench screaming "WE ARE." At Beaver Stadium, there’s not a lot of space between rows, so when I was standing as well, this woman’s ass was less than a millimeter from my sweaty, meaty hands. I had to lean back just to make sure I didn’t graze her ass, or give it a full-fledged bump. This was not a day for inappropriate touching.

"Sorry ma’am," I said. "I’m super-close to you with you standing on the bench. You mind standing down?"

"I will after kickoff."

"Fair enough."

She stood down when the game began. Every so often, the Beaver Stadium jumbotron would light up with a canned segment of O’Brien talking about the new era of Penn State football, followed by an ad screaming out "ONE TEAM," the official rebranded slogan of the program. There were no traces of the past in the stadium’s formal presentation of the game, unless the marching band’s rendition of "Cold Hearted" by Paula Abdul was meant as some kind of subversive message. The PA announcer never mentioned Joe Paterno. There was no moment of silence for him (this was the first home game since his passing). His name was nowhere to be found inside. If you were completely ignorant of the past and you attended the game, you’d never know a man named Joe Paterno ever existed. You’d also never know that Jerry Sandusky’s victims existed, and I bet they had strong feelings on Saturday about Penn State getting back to celebrating its football program so quickly, as if nothing had happened.

[CORRECTION: Several readers have noted that Penn State did hold a moment of silence for child abuse victims prior to the game. Joe Paterno’s name was not mentioned. Even though I got to my seat before kickoff, I still must have arrived too late to witness it.]

At halftime, after Ohio scored their second touchdown to take a lead they would never relinquish, I slipped out of the stands to beat the heat and resume my hunt for the statue site. I was told to look for the new trees in front of Gate F, and sure enough, I eventually stumbled upon a grassy knoll festooned with a bare handful of decorations. It was a makeshift shrine to the Old Man, as if he were buried under that very spot. There was a small bunch of flowers ringed with a printout of JoePa’s picture, a JoePa bobblehead wearing green beads (?), an Outback Bowl hat, one of those "Hey Media" shirts, and a Penn State jersey laid on the ground. A cheap jersey, as if the donor wanted to give JoePa a jersey but didn’t want to sacrifice any of his GOOD jerseys. To my left, a woman stood with her face in her hands, weeping.

Beyond the shrine, at Gate B, there was an entryway engraved with the words "IN HONOR OF JOE PATERNO’S COACHING CAREER." Underneath the engraving was a series of bricks donated by alumni to honor the man, including a brick donated by disgraced university president Graham Spanier. Other bricks included quick messages like, "Honesty, passion, ethics=Success," "Go Joe!," "Joe will always be #1," and "Prefer nothing whatever to excellence." That last one confused me, but that’s what happens when a brick gives you less space for your message than a Tweet. Those bricks are the only formal recognition of Paterno left at the stadium, at least that I could find. You will see far more statues and plaques honoring General James Beaver than you will the old football coach. I didn’t even know Beaver Stadium was named after a person. I assumed the name was meant to commemorate the abundance of river-based wildlife in the area.

As the game slipped away from Penn State inside the stadium, I took a walk outside down Curtin Street to the Berkey Creamery, the on-campus ice cream shop operated by PSU’s food science students. The line stretched out the door, not atypical for a gameday. For less than five bucks, you can get a cone with roughly thirty scoops on top. They still sell Peachy Paterno here, and I made a point of ordering it. I did this in the name of journalism, even though I think fruit ice creams are bullshit. If they really wanted to honor the man, they would have put Twix bars in there.

I made my way back to Beaver Stadium just as Ohio was sealing the victory with a late interception. Thousands of drunken, overheated students passed by me. They had all been so boisterous at the beginning of the day, cheering wildly during the pre-game intros and when the offense converted on an early 4th-and-1 near midfield. But the heat and the losing and the drinking eventually got to them.

Some of them were clearly angry about the loss. I wanted to pull them aside and tell them to buck up. Losing, after all, is exactly what this program needs right now. Being shitty for four years will allow Penn State the chance to continue its football tradition in relative peace and quiet. After this week, the novelty of journalists like me going to Penn State to gawk at all the Paterno apologists will wear off, and the program will soon become just another also-ran in the Big Ten (whose new logo, I must note, is godawful). Besides, no one really loses in college football. You either win, or you drink. Both are fine outcomes.

One student loudly cursed the NCAA, just like his shirt said he would, and I wanted to tell him that the NCAA did him a favor. I never bought the NCAA’s bullshit threat that they were going to ban PSU football for four years. They said it just to sound tough. The "zombie penalty" that NCAA handed out instead—so named because it will turn the program into a period of walking dead—may result it a lot of losing, but it still allows the party to go on. It lets Penn State purge the ghost of Paterno with relative speed, instead of letting his specter linger around a dormant program, and the rest of college football, for years and years. Officials at Penn State are clearly eager to move on, and most of the fans seemed happy to follow suit. A group of Ohio students walked by and were left in peace, even when they shouted "O! U!" to each other. Penn State, shockingly, doesn’t have a monopoly on school pride.

I came back to my tailgate party and while you might have expected everyone to follow that one student’s lead and bitch about the NCAA, my companions were much more interested in blaming the disastrous loss on defensive coordinator Ted Roof and quarterback Matt McGloin. "McGloin turned back into McGloin in the second half," said one of them.

Overall, there was a palpable sense of relief on this day for most Penn State fans. They finally got back to the pleasures of tailgating and drinking and cornhole (snicker snicker) and bitching about not being good enough to win a championship. For many of them, this was all they wanted. And while Paterno may have been the progenitor of much of this merriment, it’s clear that he’s not essential to it. At least not now. This place doesn’t belong to Joe Paterno anymore. I had planned on attending this game with an old friend of mine who was a Penn State alum, but she backed out, explaining that it would be too heartbreaking to come back after everything that had happened. I wished she had come with me. I think she would have found it far less painful than she expected.

In my particular line of work, it’s not exactly good business to say nice things about Penn State these days. It’s also terribly easy, from afar, to dismiss Happy Valley as some kind of X-Files inbred cultist compound, where people walk around in white robes and chain their kids to the radiator and rub their genitals with locks of JoePa’s hair at night. I know it’s easy to make such stereotypes because I’ve done it, and it’s crazy fun.

But the fact is, there wasn’t a single moment walking around Happy Valley on Saturday when I wished that the cold hand of NCAA bureaucracy would wipe all this away. It would make hundreds of thousands of people—none of whom had anything to do with Jerry Sandusky’s crimes nor the villainy that ensued in their wake—miserable, and to what end? As some kind of magical cure-all for institutional coverups? As punishment for the community standing behind the old man? Something tells me a lot of people here don’t want Joe Paterno defined by child molestation because they don’t want to be defined by child molestation. This place has essentially been branded the Child Rape Capital of America. Would you be happy if it were your hometown? Isn’t having Matt McGloin as your QB punishment enough?

Or maybe it’s just that I’m brainwashed now, too. Maybe they got to me. I’m an easy mark, after all. Give me free beer and sausage, and I’ll remain in your thrall forever. I walked around and saw so many happy people engaging in so many happy things (even the guy I saw getting arrested for DUI looked convivial as he was being pulled over) that it was pointless to resist. It takes a real dick to come here only to sneer at the festivities, and even I’m not up to that particular task. This place didn’t exactly strike me as Jonestown.

In November, Grantland’s Charlie Pierce wrote that, "It no longer matters if there continues to be a football program at Penn State. It no longer even matters if there continues to be a university there at all." On Saturday, I got a profound sense of how wrong that is, not to mention how impractical it would be to raze the entire school (seriously, it’s huge). Penn State football still matters to a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of them. They still find it to be a positive thing in their lives, but—and this is the key—not the only thing in their lives. I think that alone is proof of its value. While many in State College still defend Paterno—and I think they’re wrong to do so—it doesn’t make them all pieces of shit. There’s a lot worth salvaging here. But I suppose we can keep on going back and forth about that on message boards for a long time. I’ll probably change my mind again after another damning indictment is handed down.

The next morning, on my way out of town, I swung by McKee Street to take a look at the house. His house. You know whose. This was just as dawn was breaking. There were no lights on inside, but it had wide windows, big enough to let in plenty of nascent sunlight. I could see inside the living room easily, enough to feel like a scumbag for peeping. But there was no one there. I stepped out of the car and found myself on an empty street, with no one else around. The Paternos were gone. The media was gone. The JoePa fanboys were gone. They were all gone. But the rest of Penn State—the stadium, the tailgaters, the drunken freshmen, the crappy football team, the "WE ARE" chants and the marching band—all of it is still here. Still alive and breathing, whether you like it or not. Maybe someone should put that on a t-shirt.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.